Alpenföhn Peter VGA Cooler

Modern high end videocards can be small nuclear graphical powerplants. Putting out a lot of heat when working full load to render smooth frames per second in your favourite game. Sometimes the boxed aka reference cooler is up to the task and keeps everything at reasonable operating temperatures. Though many maxed out their cooling capacity or are just too darn loud. This is where companies alike Arctic Cooling, Thermalright,... and Alpenföhn come to your rescue. Todays Alpenföhn Peter VGA cooler will try to cool our Fermi based GTX480 graphics card in stock and overclocked configuration.

Unboxing

German based EKL Alpenföhn brand is well known for their very powerfull processor cooling solutions. EKL now tries to gain ground in the GPU cooling market. This with a single fan design baptised Heidi for mainstram cards ( a revised version Heidi 2 is soon to be released). And a dual or more fan solution for the more powerfull (read hot) cards with todays reviewed Peter VGA cooler.

The Peter VGA consists of 12 high end 6mm heatpipes,. The total cooling surface is made up by 91 soldered aluminium fins. This thing is freaking huge. Measuring 253.5mm x 100mm x 44mm and weighing a total of +/-650 grams ( cooler alone ). The weight might not look like a concern, but keep in mind that the only point of contact with the videocard is the GPU. The PCB is not stiffened at all.

Cooling power is not included and can be chosen according your requirements ( maximum performance, low noise,...) Mountable via the black anodised Alu bracket for a max of up to four 120mm fans or two/three 140mm fans.

The boxart is nicely looking. Alpenföhn adheres to typical german names for their products. No funky stuff nor inspiration by any media form.

Some shots of the cooler. The copper base is nickel plated for a perfect surface. The rest of the pictures speak for themselves.

The included accessoires providing maximum GPU compatibility, via removable brackets and with an enormous amount of heatsinks. Really the amount of heatsinks leaves no option open. There's even a screwable VRM cooler provided for ATI cards. Alike the Arctic G1 thermal solution, Alpenföhn includes a similar thermal glue. Though curing time is way faster and there's no need to mix different compounds.

The big black anodised bracket allows multiple fans to be installed. The whole fan setup is fixed directly to the case. This to unload the PCB of extra pressure as the total weight could be too much too handle.